Birthday Lamentations
by BuryTheHatchet
Summary: "They stood, side by side, staring at the remains. It was an annual ritual, a pilgrimage to the burnt out farmhouse. It had not been touched in fourteen years and the skeletal blackened charcoal structure was slowly crumbling and succumbing to the harsh environment of Israel." Tony and Tali at the farmhouse. Sad, but good. I think. Or at least I hope. Read and judge for yourself.


**I lied. I have written one more post Family First fiction. And cried the whole way through…again. I was inspired whilst talking to my dad as we walked through the cemetery today. We were actually talking about my Grandfather, but it sort of sparked this.**

 **I know I have not uploaded the other post Family First story that I promised, but the first chapter to that is not finished and I am stuck on it, waiting for inspiration to hit. It does not write correctly however I do it.**

 **Anyway, I did want to upload this on the 12** **th** **of November this year, but I do not know how feasible that would be, since I already know that I am going to be really quite busy then, and I also would not be able to guarantee that I would not forget completely about it. Which means I am going to upload it now.**

Birthday Lamentations

November 12th

They stood, side by side, staring at the remains. It was an annual ritual, a pilgrimage to the burnt out farmhouse. It had not been touched in fourteen years and the skeletal blackened charcoal structure was slowly crumbling and succumbing to the harsh environment of Israel.

Some said the land was haunted by the old director of Mossad and his children, the son and daughter who had left such a trail of destruction, others said it was cursed, and had been long before Eli David had set foot on it, but everyone agreed that the land was worthless, or at least it was not worth the trouble. That is, it was worthless to everyone but them. To them it was their only link to _her_ : his lover, her mother.

"Tell me about her." She asked quietly, a whisper softer than the harsh wind. He had not heard her, but he knew she had said it – she said it every year. At first they had both tried to speak about her as often as possible, to keep her memory alive, but then she had noticed how much it hurt him every time she was mentioned, and he saw how much she longed to have her mother back, and so by mutual agreement the only time they spoke about her was at the farm house where so much had happened.

"I loved her." He started off quietly, finding his words. "She'd seen so much, and yet she still had the ability to have an optimistic outlook on life. She would take every blow anyone could offer, and still be willing to fight to defend the ones she loved and the things she believed in. She was such a strong woman – the strongest." He watched as his daughter crouched down, the bright blue headscarf she had used to protect herself from the harsh desert sun billowing in the wind, and picked up a handful of the sandy dirt, letting it trickle through the gaps between her fingers. It was still, after all these years, tainted by the black ash, and stained her hands a dusty grey. "She had the best of smiles, too, and I would spend all day just trying to elicit one. They used to brighten the whole room. Most of my attempts failed, but on the odd occasion she would look back at me and her face would glow and she would laugh and everyone would turn and look, because it was such a beautiful, rare sound." She looked up at him skeptically. "I'm not kidding – she really had that effect on people. It used to be agonizing to have to see her go home every night – those few hours without her were always the most painful hours of my life."

"Why did you do nothing about it then?"

"I was scared." His voice cracked slightly and she stood up, taking his hand and squeezing it slightly. "Promise me that you'll never be scared to love? Promise me that you'll never wait 'til it's too late to tell the person you love that you love them?" She nodded, tears spilling down her cheeks. He wrapped his arms around her, engulfing her in a hug, and pressed a series of kisses to the top of her head. "Oh, my beautiful, beautiful, brave little girl. She would have been so, so proud of you. She would have loved you so much." His teardrops landed on the blue fabric that reflected the clear blue sky in colour.

"She used to talk about you. All the time, she would tell me how much she loved you. She used to say you were her soul-mate." She buried her face deeper into his chest, muffling her voice. "I miss her, Abba."

"I know, Baby Girl. I miss her too."

They pulled away from each other, furiously wiping their eyes and pulling up the fierce mask of bravery. They didn't want Ziva to see their weakness, to be disappointed in them. They headed their separate directions, he to the place where he had watched her bury her list, she to the ruins of the house.

He had gone over the house so many times, scavenging the last few things that he could find, remnants of it's previous inhabitants, but gave up after a couple of years, not finding anything else to bring him closer to her. And the building wasn't the same as the last time he had been there, not without her. So he went to the only place he felt truly close to her, the place where they had shared their first kiss, their first kiss as both of them being them and not other people. He would sit and relive their last days together, images flashing before his eyes, the hot, desolate landscape his cinema screen.

She still walked through the rubble and debris, running her hands along fallen beams and crumbling walls as she moved further into the wreckage, growing ever closer to the rooms barely touched by the fire that had claimed her mother's life and closer to the room that had saved hers. It was the only room that had not suffered any damage at all, not even from smoke. Over the years it had remained well protected from the elements and as she pushed the door open a torrent of fresh tears flooded down her cheeks.

A man in an office with a comfortable sofa had once told her father that it was 'Survivor's Guilt', that she blamed herself for surviving when her mother had not been so fortunate. And maybe she did, a little, but what haunted her the most was that they had never had any proof. It troubled her father too. There had never been a body, not a single identifiable bone fragment – or any bone fragment to her knowledge – found in the house. She remembered her mother's hand brushing her hair out of her eyes, her mother's lips pressing a kiss to her forehead and her nose and her lips. She remembered dreaming of a father in another land, saving innocent people. She remembered the immense heat and the crackle of the fire, the splintering of wood and the shattering of glass. She remembered an unidentifiable man in flame retardant clothing and a helmet lifting her to safety. But she did not remember hearing her mother's voice, shouting for help. She remembered her mother's final words to her though, she remembered seeing the tears in her eyes as she told her that she would be loved forever, no matter whether they were together or apart.

She ran her fingers along the blue walls, the walls the colour of her headscarf, the headscarf her mother had kept in the go-bag. The furniture was still in place, a small child's bed, a chest of drawers, a toy chest. There was broken glass on the floor – imbedded in the carpet along with the soot and the splinters of wood and the powdered brick dust that coated the derelict building – that crunched as she stepped on it. It always did. There was still bedding on the bed and still clothes in the drawers, but they were musty, long since being worn last. Nothing personal remained in the room, all of the pictures having being taken out years ago and all of the soft toys hidden in a box under her bed in Paris.

After staring at the room that had preserved her life for a short while, she swung her backpack off of her shoulders and pulled out a digital camera. It had been a birthday present, sent over from America from her parent's friends. She didn't remember any of them, but they always sent a card and a gift. They knew not to bother them this weekend though, because this was a special weekend that was always spent in Israel, no matter whether she was supposed to be at school or her father was supposed to be at work, they always went to the farmhouse on her mother's birthday. She also pulled out an old Polaroid instant camera, a gift from her 'Grandpa Gibbs'. He was just a name to her, but to her parents he had been everything – a leader, a father, a listener.

The cameras had a weight to them and to her it felt like she was holding the world in the palm of her hands. Her father had always been adamant that they would never bring phones or cameras there, that it was a sacred place that should not be disrupted or disrespected by anything, but she had convinced him to allow her to take photos for an art project. It was by far her best subject in school, particularly photography, hence the birthday present of something she knew had cost a fortune. Everyone else in her small class had opted to study flowers, or dancers, or architecture for their project, but she had wanted something with a message. She had wanted something that meant something, to her and her father. She wanted to capture a history in her art, her history.

She snapped an image of the rumpled bed-sheets; identical to how they had been abandoned when she had been carried away, screaming for her Ima. Then a picture of the toy box, only a scarce few playthings littering the bottom of it. The paint was pealing from all of the woodwork, distorting her name, painted on the side in orange Hebrew lettering.

As she walked back through the house, the images started getting darker; a desk cluttered with objects not even God would have recognized, a blackened teddy bear, the dress she had worn the day before the fire, caught in a pile of wood, torn to shreds by the weather and the wild animals. She tugged the white, tattered material free and curled her fingers around it, wishing it smelt of her mother and not of the acrid smoke that still filled her nostrils. There was a stain on it, sheltered from the conditions that had ruined the rest of the dress by being concealed under a particularly heavy wooden strut, and she remembered spilling her dinner down herself. Her mother had told her she was as messy as her father and she had laughed.

The material was folded carefully and placed in her bag and she continued on her quest to find the most abhorrent of all scenes.

And then she found it.

She could see through a gap in the wall of her mother's burnt-out bedroom her father, sat in the dusty, sandy dirt of the olive grove, his head in his hands and his shoulders shaking. She used the Polaroid camera, making sure to get the outline of the crack in the wall in the shot as well as her father's hunched figure. She slipped it into one of the pockets of her bag and ventured back out into the bright light of the day, treading silently through the trees so she was parallel to her father, about 30 yards down. She could see his face from where she stood, leaning against one of the old, gnarled trees. It looked even more haggard that it normally did, but that was usual for this weekend. It was an emotionally exhausting trip, and she was always allowed to take the whole week off school to recover. She took two candid images, one with each camera, of the profile of his face. The Polaroid caught the feeling and the emotion of the moment, the sorrow and misery, whilst the digital camera captured the details of his face, the creases and crevices, the way his features sagged and the tear tracks made in the layer of dust and soot that covered his flesh.

This would be the first time he would never look at her art. She knew it would hurt him to see it and she didn't care that he would never see it, because she wasn't sure she even wanted to see it – only she knew it had to be done. Someone had to be able to see their anguish.

At school she was the quiet girl who had an American father and a mysterious, exotic mother whom nobody had ever met. When she was younger someone, probably one of the single mothers who had flirted with her father to no avail, had spread a rumor claiming that she had a demoness as a mother, who had come down to earth and seduced her father, leaving her in return. She frequently captured the attention of the males in her class, along with any human with a Y chromosome that walked past her on the street, even if all she wanted was to be left to her thoughts, which only served to add fuel to the fires of gossip that spread around her – that and her short temper, a wrath that could disrupt the whole school when she lost control. Nobody knew her history, nobody knew that she had been pulled from the fire that killed her mother at two, had been sent to America to her father, a man who had no clue of her existence and was grieving the loss of his best friend and love. They had no idea that she and he had, together, spent years trying to prove that her mother was still alive somewhere, both spending time in psychiatrists' offices because her grandfather was convinced they were going insane. Nobody knew of her nightmares, the ones of the orange flames and her mothers last words, nobody knew of the agonizing grief she carried with her wherever she went or the seething desire to hug her mother one last time. To her peers she was just the freak who struggled with her French and spoke to nobody unless forced.

Her father lifted his head, the subtle movement looking like it took all of his energy, and she nodded gently: time to go home. She walked over and helped him up, knowing that the lethargy that had overcome him would only be gone once he had spent a week on his own in their little terraced house in Paris with no disruptions from her or his father, The Sound Of Music playing on repeat and a bottle of bourbon on the coffee table, the red seal unbroken.

She knew he had brought the bottle at the airport the night he had left her mother in Israel, knew that her Grandpa Gibbs had confiscated it from him in order to prevent him from doing anything stupid. She knew that it went with him wherever he went. She knew that the only thing that was stopping him from drowning himself in it was her.

This was the hardest week in the year for both of them. It was the week that she spent most of her time on the streets, photographing all the sad things she could find and the week he spent remembering the best eight years of his life.

 **I have just realized how depressing so much of my work is. If it is any consolation, I was working on a funny-ish TIVA story this morning, which, although far from being complete, is going to hopefully be up soon, and there is my 50** **th** **NCIS story, which is going to be…a bit of everything…happy, sad, fluffy, angsty…I am very excited for it, although I am only half way through writing it, so it might take some time still, but I have been putting a lot of work into it and I think you will all enjoy it…or at least I hope you will…**

 **For my reference: 41** **st** **NCIS fic.**


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